Category Archives: News

A recent report of widespread sexual abuse against children in Morocco has led to calls for chemical castration of offenders.

However, this demand faces the objection of people who believe that it will violate people’s basic civil liberties.

An estimated 71 cases of sexual abuse against children take place in the kingdom daily, and about 26,000 annually, according to a report by the association “Don’t Touch My Child.”

The country’s penal code punishes sex offenders with up to 30 years in prison, a sentence handed to Spanish national Daniel Galvan Vina in 2011 after he was found guilty of raping 11 Moroccan children in the city of Kenitra.

Vina was released earlier this month in a royal pardon that sparked protests throughout the country.

Top-level diplomacy with Spain helped put Vina back in prison, albeit in his home country.

The “Daniel Scandal” intensified discussion in Morocco about ways to clamp down on sexual abuse against children.

An initiative by a top judge has attracted particular public attention.

Mohammad al-Khadraoui, of the Court of Cassation, wrote in an article published on the popular Moroccan news website Hespress that chemical castration should be considered to punish sex offenders.

The judge cited examples of countries where this measure is applied or experimented with, including France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Norway, South Korea, Russia, Australia and the United States.

Chemical castration refers to the use of medications to stop or reduce the production of testosterone linked with sexual drive.

It is different from physical castration, where the testicles or ovaries are removed.

The effects of chemical castration disappear when the person stops taking the drug.

Ahmed al-Haaej, president of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, said it contradicts human liberties, adding that more protective rather than punitive measures are required to combat sex offenses.

The measure is a form of corporal punishment, like the death penalty, which goes against international human rights laws, said Haaej.

Aicha Khammas, a Moroccan lawyer and member of parliament, said the country does not need to authorize such a measure because reforming existing laws would reduce sexual offenses against children and women.

The burden of proof on victims of sexual offense is currently “very heavy,” and the laws should make it easy to prosecute offenders, Khammas added.

“Chemical castration is similar to the death penalty. There’s the right to life, and the right to preserving one’s physical characteristics,” she said.

Allowing judges to order chemical castration for sex offenders “risks making doctors agents of social control, with their obligation switching from the patient to the state,” said Grubin, who coordinated a voluntary program of chemical castration in the UK.

The measure is not a treatment for a sexual offence, but a treatment for a sexual offender where it is medically indicated, he added.

The UK’s Daily Mirror newspaper reported in 2012 that 100 pedophiles were being chemically castrated in England’s Whatton prison.

Gubrin, who was in charge of the program in coordination with the prison service and the Department of Health, said chemical castration helps curb offenders’ tendency to repeat their crimes.

“There is a lack of randomized controlled studies for obvious reasons, but those on medication typically have very low reoffending rates,” he said.

Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, Thursday declared war on South Sudan, vowing to topple its government.

The move comes after Sudan’s parliament passed a resolution branding South Sudan’s ruling party an enemy that “must be fought until it is defeated.”

Sudan and South Sudan are embroiled in the worst clashes along their poorly defined border since the secession of the South last summer. The United Nations Security Council is considering sanctions on both countries in an attempt to end the violence, and demanded South Sudanese forces withdraw from their occupation of the 60,000-barrels-a-day oil fieldHeglig oil field. Both countries continue to ignore calls to end the fighting.

On a visit Thursday to the oil-rich, restive border state of South Kordofan, Bashir rallied his troops, which are now engaged on three fronts with South Sudan.

“Heglig isn’t the end, it is the beginning, and we shall go all the way to [South Sudanese capital] Juba,” Bashir told a rally.

South Sudan’s army spokesman, Col. Philip Aguer, dismissed Bashir’s threat, saying that the South’s army would keep Sudan’s aggression at bay.

“If they didn’t defeat us when we were a green army, how will they defeat us now,” he said.

Sudan and South Sudan have been at odds for 20 years, a time that included two civil wars believed to have claimed the lives of more than two million people. The South’s secession left several issues unresolved, including how to share oil revenue and production between the reserve-rich South and the north, center of refineries, ports and other infrastructure.

Battles around Heglig continued Thursday, with Sudanese planes continuing aerial bombardments, damaging oil wells and buildings, according to Col. Aguer. South Sudan said it repulsed a Sudanese ground attack on Heglig Wednesday evening, forcing Sudanese troops to retreat to Kersana, some 40 kilometers north of the oil field.

Troops also engaged around Bahr el Ghazal and South Sudan captured a base used by Sudan to train militias. These claims couldn’t be verified independently. Both countries accuse each other of sponsoring proxy rebels in the others territory.

Bashir accuses the South of implementing the agenda of foreign countries which backed its secession bid, at the expense of its own people.

Many say that the war rhetoric has been escalated by the loss of oil revenues, the lifeline of both Sudan and South Sudan.

The capture of Heglig and the subsequent halt of oil production there has halved Sudan’s oil output to 55,000 barrels a day, while a separate dispute over transit fees has seen South Sudan shut in its entire 350,000 barrels a day of production since January.

South Sudan has called for talks to end the current dispute, with Information Minister Barnaba Benjamin saying that its people would never look at Sudan as its enemy due to their “long history and long common border.”

Many say hard-liners with a history of taking rigid negotiating positions seem to be running the show in both Sudan and South Sudan, a situation that may stymie attempts for a peaceful settlement of post secession disputes.

The Obama Administration continues its war against the truth about Islam and jihad. If any of this material was really inaccurate, then certainly it should have been removed. One wonders, however, who was judging its accuracy — was it Muslim Brotherhood-linked operatives intent on whitewashing uncomfortable truths about Islam? Or was it an informed and patriotic analyst? And removing material deemed “offensive to Muslims” is unconscionable, especially since Islamic supremacist anti-freedom groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations find offensive any and all anti-terror material that is accurate at all about the source of the jihad threat.

“At FBI, 876 pages of agent training material related to Muslims found offensive or inaccurate,” by Pete Yost for the Associated Press, March 30 (thanks to all who sent this in):

WASHINGTON (AP) — An FBI review of agent training material critical of Islam uncovered 876 offensive or inaccurate pages that had been used in 392 presentations, including a PowerPoint slide that said the bureau can sometimes bend or suspend the law.The bureau has not released the material, but Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois described a few pages of it in a letter asking FBI Director Robert Mueller to institute five changes so that inappropriate FBI training on Islam doesn’t happen again. On Friday, the FBI confirmed the number of inaccurate or offensive pages and presentations.

The bureau also said the documents that are either offensive or inaccurate have been taken out of training presentations.

Every trainer was identified and interviewed by an FBI inspection team and the team determined that the problems were performance-related — poor judgment or inadequate training — rather than intentional misconduct, said FBI spokesman Michael Kortan.

As a result, instructors were counseled and in some cases removed from training positions.

Durbin said he’s disturbed that the FBI doesn’t plan to produce a written report on the six-month review. He said he wants the agents who received the bad training to be retained.

It began last September after the online publication Wired.com reported that the FBI had discontinued a lecture in which the instructor told agent trainees in Virginia that the more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he is to be violent. The analyst subsequently gave a similar lecture at an FBI-sponsored public-private partnership in New York City.

Kortan declined to address the issue of retraining.

Out of 160,000 pages of training material reviewed, just 876 pages — less than 1 percent — were “inconsistent with the FBI’s core values,” said Kortan. “We strongly disagree that the analysts being trained were led to believe that we actually bend or suspend the law in any way. The one reference used in the slide was poorly described.”…

Durbin is out for blood, and Stalinist reeducation:

Durbin’s letter said he wants the FBI to turn over the offending training material to the Senate Judiciary Committee and wants unclassified versions of the material to be released to the public; wants instructors responsible for the inappropriate training reassigned; and wants to retrain agents who received the bad training. Durbin also wants the bureau to undertake a review of FBI intelligence analyses of Islam, American-Muslims and Arab-Americans; and wants a detailed training curriculum on Islam that has been approved by experts on Islam.Earlier this month, the FBI posted on its website a set of training principles which said that training must emphasize that religious expression, protest activity and the espousing of ideological beliefs “are constitutionally protected activities that must not be equated with terrorism or criminality” in the absence of other information about such offenses.